This is the third post of the Finding Humour in the Environmental History of the Climate Crisis series edited by Nuala Proinnseas Caomhánach.
In 2020, during the early days of the COVID-19’ crisis and lockdown, a pod of Iberian orcas began ramming boats, including luxury yachts, in the Strait of Gibraltar. The resulting memes were hilarious. Images of orcas with captions that read “capsize the rich” and “fuck them yachts” circulated widely across social media. Some species of orcas are endangered, including the Iberian pod and the Southern Pacific group, which only made the memes more urgent and compelling. Many expressed solidarity with the orcas saying things such as: “I’m joining the war on the side of the orcas” and “orcas forming a military against us is the only thing that has made sense recently.” Although many biologists were quick to caution against ascribing revenge to the actions of the whales, the memes continued unabated. A large number of the orca memes express anticapitalistic and interspecies solidarity and they undoubtedly fit Nicole Seymour’s understanding of “bad environmentalism” as they deliberately misunderstand and ignore information from scientific experts.1 Was it COVID-19 cabin fever that led to the virality of these memes? Or did they hit the public in their politically vulnerable spots – that the climate crisis cannot be humorous?
Memes often function as a synecdoche for larger social issues, including climate change, species extinction, and other environmental issues. They are simple, visual, and fairly easily made and readily shared, but also highlight the internet’s power to turn something into a symbol. Media scholars, such as Andrew Ross and Damian Rivers, noted that they have become a way for people to publicly engage with larger social issues and are increasingly understood as important avenues for political participation.2 For Emily Yu Zong and Daisy Bisenieks, the use of humour in environmental memes “provides cultural indexing and diagnoses.”3 In other words, the speedy, wry, and funny storytelling at play in the creation of memes tells us a lot about cultural attitudes towards species extinction, climate change, and other issues. The beauty of memes is that they shift rapidly in response to ongoing events. For example, when the submersible carrying the millionaire Stockton Rush and four passengers imploded, a meme of an orca being interviewed read “They decided to see the titanic in a minivan sized tin can controlled by a knockoff PlayStation controller, and you’re asking the Orcas we were involved?! #OceanGate.” The anticapitalistic message remained in many orca memes, but the jokes shift as events unfolded.
Orcas hold a special place in our mediated images of wild animals. The 1993 narrative film Free Willy (Warner Brothers) is about a boy who befriends an orca in a theme park. The documentary Blackfish (Manny O Productions, CNN Films, 2013) demonstrated the deep cruelty of keeping these sea-loving mammals in captivity. While the fad of wild orcas wearing salmon as hats in the Pacific Northwest in 1987 and then again in 2024 was circulated across media platforms. The fate of the orphan whale, named kʷiisaḥiʔis or Little Hunter, who got stuck in a lagoon near the Ehattesaht First Nation after the death of her mother was closely followed by news outlets. Similarly, the orca mother, named Tahlequah, who carried around her dead child for 17 days spawned human outpourings of grief and sympathy. As charismatic megafauna that are beloved, widely recognized, and show up across media platforms, orcas are prime for meme-ification. As X user @Sarah_Nicolas tweeted, “Y’all raised an entire generation on free willy and you expect us to take the yacht’s side???”
The group of Iberian orcas that has been ramming luxury yachts since 2020 is led by a matriarch named White Gladis by scientists.4 The pod focuses on sailboats, seemingly ignoring other types of vessels, and it often breaks rudders by bumping and pushing them. The “bad environmentalism” of the orca memes centers on the question of what motivated the Iberian orcas’ actions. Although no clear consensus exists amongst scientists, many agree that it is likely orcas are ramming rudders for fun, as part of a game or fad (like the salmon hats). In spite of the scientific uncertainty about why the orcas are ramming boats, the memes gleefully celebrate the orca behaviour and position the orcas as anti-capitalist eco-warriors. One meme used American design company Lisa Frank’s sweet and colourful image of a penguin, orca, and dolphin with the words: “Sink Boats, Kill Humans, Restore Balance.” Many of the memes used social justice movement language around allyship: one tweet read “DMing every orca i know and begging them to tell me how a land based ally can help;” another said “Have you guys seen JK Rowling’s $19.2M yacht? And by ‘you guys’ I mean orcas.” Another showed a person transforming (à la Animorphs) into an orca with the text: “Me seeing a billionaire with a yacht.” The narrative includes human allies who are involved in the interspecies resistance to human domination and environmental destruction.
Many memes celebrated interspecies, anti-capitalist solidarity by reframing other nature stories: a New York Post headline about a Netflix film crew being attacked by sharks was shared on X with the caption: “orcas and sharks setting their differences aside and teaming up against humans this year.” Another news story about an unusual sighting of orcas swimming with dolphins off the coast of New England was shared with the addendum “the orcas are organizing internationally across species now.” When journalist Jacob Stern wrote an article for The Atlantic in 2023 titled “Killer Whales Are Not Our Friends,” memers were quick to respond. Nikita Gill retweeted The Atlantic headline with the caption “did a yacht write this?”5 Aiden Moher also retweeted the article with the caption “Orca expert here! If you see an orca ramming a boat, DON’T approach it. They only do that when the ruling class of billionaires are ruining the planet and society to satiate their endless obsession with wealth and hegemony.” The memers stubbornly insist on an anti-capitalistic environmental narrative that the pod of Iberian orcas, led by matriarch Gladis, act out of revenge for environmental damage done by humankind.
In her book Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, Ursula Heise argued that the stories we tell about endangered species like the Iberian orcas, are predominantly cultural (rather than scientific) narratives.6 Different human cultures understand their relationships with wild creatures in radically different ways. For example, the Ehattesaht-Chinehkints people frame themselves as being in kinship relations with the orcas. In response to the rescue efforts for kʷiisaḥiʔis (Little Hunter), Ehattesaht Chief Simon John noted: “We’re all family in our community and family matters…”7 A meme by @giniwcollective reflects this relationality, contrasting an image of two groups of Indigenous people in canoes with one person touching a breaching orca with an image of an orca ramming a rudder with the words: “When We Meet Orcas. When You Meet Orcas.” The meme clearly critiques Eurocentric ways of being in relation with orcas as both diminished and combative.
The language used by scientists, especially when asked about themes raised in orca memes, offers a slightly different understanding of human and orca relations. When asked about the possibility of the animals acting for revenge, anthropologist, Barbara J. King, said that although she is not “suggesting this [behaviour is] in support of an ‘uprising’” that revenge is “not outside the realm of reasonable expectation and it would not necessarily be anthropomorphic.”8 Natural history writer Philip Hoare, noted that orcas “have a clear sense of what humans have done to their environment” and zoologist Alfredo López Fernández noted that “What we can learn from [the orcas’] new habit is “that they are very intelligent, and that we are bothering them a lot.”9 These conversations suggest that good relationships with non-human creatures is important to understanding and mitigating environmental problems. At the same time, it highlights the limitations of western science to articulate an objective interpretation of complex behaviour.
Zong and Bisenieks argued that “humour [in memes] may already have an affinity with ecology through its celebration of incongruity, adaptation and ambiguity beyond rational mastery, making visible the ways nature and culture entangle in shared and contingent struggles for survival in the loss of ecological equilibrium and its possible renewal.”10 A significant proportion of the orca memes position orcas and humans as being class allies in the face of rampant capitalism, which is beautifully summarized by the meme “You are significantly closer to being an orca than being a millionaire.” As with other Anthropocene discourses, many of the orca memes lump together all of humanity as being equally responsible for environmental crises, ignoring the extent to which specific humans from particular human cultures, namely white and wealthy, are the ones largely responsible for the climate crises. Nonetheless, orca memes, and the larger discourse surrounding them, can be understood as a mediated repository for human desire, particularly for a longing for better interspecies relationships. As Philip Hoare and fellow nature documentarian Tom Mustill note: “We’re talking about all this now; there’s an equivalent conversation going on in orca society.”11 Perhaps time will tell what orca cultures are saying about the human cultures with whom they are in relation and perhaps they will mobilize the same irony and humour as we do.
Works Cited
1. Nicole Seymour, Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age, (University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
2. Andrew S. Ross and Damian J Rivers, “Internet Memes, Media Frames, and the Conflicting Logics of Climate Change Discourse,” Environmental Communication, vol. 13, no. 7, 2019, pp. 975-994. p. 976-977.
3. Emily Yu Zong and Daisy Bisenieks, “Dark Humour and Invasive Species Storytelling in the Age of Extinction,” Journal of Extinction Studies, vol 49, no. 1, 2025, pp. 4-21. p. 6.
4. Sophie Hardach, “Why Are Orcas Suddenly Ramming Boats?” BBC, 27 June 2023.
5. Jacob Stern, “Killer Whales Are Not Our Friends,” The Atlantic, 17 June, 2023.
6. Ursula Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, (University of Chicago Press, 2016). p.5-6.
7. “Violinist Tries to Serenade Trapped B.C. Orca Calf to Freedom,” CBC, 18 April, 2024.
8. Emma Beddington, “The Orca Uprising: Whales Are Ramming Boats – But Are They Inspired by Revenge, Grief or Memory?” The Guardian, 11 July 2023.
9. Ibid. Beddington, “The Orca Uprising,” The Guardian, 2023.
10. Emily Yu Zong and Daisy Bisenieks, “Dark Humour and Invasive Species Storytelling in the Age of Extinction,” Journal of Extinction Studies, vol 49, no. 1, 2025, pp. 4-21. p. 9.
11. Emma Beddington, “The Orca Uprising: Whales Are Ramming Boats – But Are They Inspired by Revenge, Grief or Memory?” The Guardian, 11 July 2023.
Sabine LeBel
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